Moralizing sportwriting (quite possibly the worst kind of sportswriting) is up like 1000% in the past few days. You can't swing a dead cat without hitting a overwrought, preachy column these days. Can't we talk about the BCS or something?
(yes and damn him for the child abuse too)
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We can switch, but if you swing a dead cat at any type of sportswriter, I'm afraid we are right back at start. With the added drama of "evil" blogger versus "good old-fashioned" reporters.
As for the preachiness ... Penn State brings it upon itself by being a state school parading around as a holier than thou ivy-league wanna be.
We are Penn State indeed.
Almost every school thinks too highly of itself, while employing and enrolling their fair share of lowlifes. I can't hold that against any specific school.
I doubt very much that you live in the Penn State-sphere of influence then. None of the state schools in Pa. think that highly of themselves - minus Penn State.
It is one thing for MIT or Harvard or Villanova to think too highly of itself, but Penn State thinks of itself in that class.
People chant "We Are Penn State," as if they were declaring superiority. I guess because "We Are A State School" doesn't have the same ring.
And you'd be hard pressed to find a school outside of say Florida, Ohio or Texas whose mascot adorns more vehicles.
I live more in the German sphere of influence up near QingDao.
I get what you're saying where one school in a region puts on airs, but the "other" major schools tend to react with a "They act all special but are dirtier than we are!" way. In other words - we are morally superior.
Is it the addition of "We are regionally academically superior" as well the sticking point here? That's not specific to PSU either. Arizona, Kansas, Oregon...
Maybe I'd feel different if I were bomabarded with Penn State love every day all day. Now for you - What's wrong with state schools? and how did Villanova make that short list?
I (really) should google this, but years ago I read some list of 'higher ed schhols that grant the most degrees on an annual basis" and both Penn State and Michigan were just churning them out. That probably explains the freakishly high number of Nittany Lion decals out there .. or, as my 3-year old sometimes says "a Blues Clue!".
BTW, that "other" Pennsylvania State University in Philadelphia, you know - the one that's in the Ivy League - gets @ 40% of it's funding from the State, or at least that was the case back in the early '80s.
By definition - and presuming guilt in a way that remains to play itself out in court - Sandusky was/is a phsychopath and those types are sometimes hard to spot.
Mark in Arlington
I want to say Ohio State is the biggest (but maybe they don't graduate as many)
My issues with this deal is not the calling for Paterno to resign (I think he should though if it's a "retire at year's end" deal that doesn't bother me) but the focus and disgust I read in these columns. I'm bothered, even if I understand why it is this way, by how much Paterno, easily the 4th most culpable group in this horrible scenario is getting the bulk of attention. And I can't get past how many people are grabbing at the low-hanging fruit of how a "normal" person would act in this situation and how that hypothetical normal persons morals somehow allows them to villify Paterno. The majority of people have made several bad moral decisions, have chosen not to act when they arguably should have, and have taken a "kick the problem to those who have to deal with it" approach. Part of acting in this way is accepting the consequences if things turn out badly, but the ubiquity of it takes away from me that vitriol toward Paterno that I read from others.
It's like hating the Kitty Genovese "witnesses". Would I have acted differently? I'd like to hope so, but if I can't say definitively yes, then I can't get angry at any one individual. That's me. Perhaps these people have much firmer conviction about how they would act than I do.
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